Reinvention
by h-vic
Summary: Lavender had seen and done things she hated – they all had – and it changed her, but she needed a little help to stop running from the broken doll she had become.


**Author's Notes:** Written for rarepair_shorts' Chain Reaction SuperChallenge on LJ.

Lavender's eyes fix on her reflection as she draws the brush through her hair. Her hair is long now and falls in loose, soft waves of its natural brown. It's simple, understated, and staid perhaps. Not words anyone would have once associated with her, but things change. The grey just beginning to pepper her curls is testament to that, as are the laugh lines that don't quite vanish from around her eyes, even in repose. She lays the brush on her dressing table, pulls her hair back, securing it quickly with a plain clip, and draws a careless slick of lipstick across her lips. Then she rises to leave before she is late. Her husband will be home soon, the babysitter will arrive, and they will slip out for a few stolen hours of adult conversation and food at which their boys would turn up their noses.

It amuses her sometimes now – the way in which she used to believe her appearance could define her, her appearance and who she was fucking. 'Self' had been such a fluid concept.

When she was at school, her hair changed painfully frequently, as if each new shade or style might be the one to cement her identity, and she moved from one boy to the next, flitting, flirting, trying them all on for size and yet never committing, never allowing more than a couple of stolen kisses in an empty hallway, never letting anyone too close.

After the war, she was Lavender-the-Party-Girl. It was when she'd had her flapper-hair – shiny, dark and blunt – and would stay up all night dancing, smoking and drinking cheap martinis. The boy of the moment to suit the role she played in trying so hard not to let reality creep too close had been Seamus Finnigan.

He had always been feckless and carefree, but the war had made him callous. They were all damaged in their own ways back then. It was easier to be numb and pretend the darker days hadn't happened. If they'd laughed a little too hard or drunk a little too much, it was to be expected. They were celebrating being alive, only it had never felt like celebration; it had felt like purgatory, as if Lavender had been waiting for her life to restart. Seamus had made things feel a little more real, and she had thought perhaps she could fix him and surprised herself by wanting to. Saving him might have offered a route back to the world of the truly living for her too, or so it had felt at the time.

Then one drunken night at Cho Chang's, she'd been looking for the bathroom, and instead she'd stumbled into the guest bedroom, where she'd found the hostess being thoroughly fucked by the man Lavender had begun to think she might have been able to love.

Lavender had hated him for it of course; it was almost the only thing she'd known how to feel. She'd hated them all (and in that 'all' she'd included herself) for daring to win and for making it necessary to go on living. So when she met Pansy Parkinson one night in a murky, disreputable bar, friendship with a Death Eater's daughter, who had even more cause to be bitter than she, had seemed the perfect two fingers up at those who'd underestimated and betrayed her.

They drank too much strong espresso and Jack Daniels and smoked from cigarette holders (a deliberate affectation of Pansy's). Lavender had worn her hair long and platinum blonde then, the perfect contrast with her companion's. They'd looked delicious out together, Lavender knew, and men paid attention. They'd paid even more attention the first time Pansy had kissed her, and Lavender had rather enjoyed the thrill of shocking people. She'd enjoyed the thrill even more of what Pansy could do to her when she got her alone.

And then one day, Pansy was found on the pavement forty feet below the tiny balcony of the pokey, attic flat they'd shared. Perhaps it was merely drunken carelessness, or maybe she jumped, Lavender couldn't know, but in some ways it was the inevitable end to the self-destruction of their hedonistic days.

The fog of numbness had re-descended, thicker and more comforting than before. Lavender had taken a mindless job at the Ministry of Magic to preserve the safe cocoon of her hollow lack of emotion, and let her sandy hair grow dull and lank around slumped shoulders. When Percy Weasley took an interest in her, it had perplexed her, and when, on discovering she had no hobbies to distract her, he'd insisted she accompany him to the Muggle ballroom dancing lessons he'd recently commenced, it had not occurred to her to say no. As it was, his gentle hand splayed on her back, holding her close, had seemed unexpectedly comforting as they stumbled through their first, clumsy foxtrot.

One lesson had become several, and if the fact that the class should be followed by a drink one day were to be expected, that the drink should lead back to his flat was, if anything, even more so. What was unexpected though was that, in his arms, Lavender had slept properly for the first time in five years and had felt something akin to safety, when life had schooled her to feel nothing at all.

Fifteen years later and she still feels utterly safe when in her husband's arms, she muses, as his familiar head appears around their bedroom doorframe rescuing her from thoughts of the past.

"Are you ready, darling?" Percy asks, as he kisses her softly and with the warmth of long familiarity and brings her back to herself, anchoring her as he always does. "You look beautiful, you know."

She still surprises herself by believing him.


End file.
